Take a deep breath and get ready for an olfactory onslaught: Nostrils are becoming a target for marketers.

As more jaded consumers turn up their noses at traditional ads and marketers scramble for alternatives, scent-based promotions are growing. Trade journal Advertising Age just named scents as an expected top ad trend in 2007.

"The use of scents is one more way to break through the clutter," says Yankee Candle (YCC) marketing head Rick Ruffolo. Yankee's December catalog offered more than a dozen candle fragrance samples, such as cinnamon and "Christmas cookie."

Other recent aromatic advertising:

•Kraft Foods (KFT). One million People magazine subscribers last month got a special Kraft-sponsored holiday issue featuring "rub-and-smell" ads for products such as cherry Jell-O and white fudge Chips Ahoy.

•PepsiCo (PEP). Diet Pepsi Jazz promotions have included print ads, coupons and store signs infused with the new soft drink's fruit and French vanilla fragrances.

•Verizon Wireless (VZ). Stores in the Northeast used chocolate "scent strips" to hype LG Electronics' new mobile phone and music player named Chocolate.

Companies spent $50 million to $80 million on scent-related marketing in 2006, says Harald Vogt, founder of The Scent Marketing Institute consultancy and researcher. That includes spending to fill stores and hotels with customer-pleasing aromas. Vogt predicts spending will pass $500 million by 2016.

Boosting the trend is improved technology for more creative, cheaper and longer-lasting fragrance-based ads, says Bob Bernstein, president of Scentisphere, which supplies scented coatings to marketers and printers. While the bouquet from past perfume-laced magazine ads dissipated quickly after the strip was pulled, he says, scents now can be released with the rub of a finger, last 20 to 30 seconds and be re-activated for years.

"As (scent marketing) technology becomes more flexible, we've started to use it more," Ruffolo says. It helps that companies like Yankee Candle offer more information about scented products, such as what "Christmas cookie" candles would smell like.

But scent can work in emotional ways as well. Verizon saw it as a way to add fun to the launch of the new phone, spokesman John Johnson says. At the Yankee Candle stores, "Scent is integral to the customer experience — it creates the atmosphere," Ruffolo says.

At least one scent ad failed the sniff test, however.

In December, the California Milk Processor Board gave several San Francisco bus shelters a chocolate chip cookie aroma in a Got Milk? promotion. But the Municipal Transportation Agency ordered the ads removed after complaints from advocacy groups worried the scent could trigger allergic reactions, MTA spokeswoman Maggie Lynch says.

The agency didn't have enough advance warning to do "due diligence" for consumer safety, she says.

"We're a very green city. We are concerned about how ecologically sound is everything we do."